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Research Centre for Japanese Language and Linguistics www.orinst.ox.ac.uk/research/jap-ling/ University of Oxford The syntax of mood constructions in Old Japanese: A corpus based

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The syntax of mood constructions in Old Japanese:
 A corpus based study

Kerri L Russell and Peter Sells

University of Oxford and University of York East Asian Linguistics Seminar, 4 March 2014

Research Centre for Japanese Language and Linguistics University of Oxford オックスフォード大学 日本語研究センター www.orinst.ox.ac.uk/research/jap-ling/

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Introduction

  • The Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese (OCOJ)
  • The present study

An overview of mood constructions in OJ

  • Imperatives
  • Prohibitives
  • Optatives

Discussion Conclusions

Outline

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The Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese (OCOJ) is an

annotated digital corpus of all extant texts from the Old Japanese (OJ) period (7th and 8th century CE).

It consists of about 90,000 words. Funding bodies:

Introduction: The OCOJ

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People:

Introduction: The OCOJ

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A poem (MYS.8.1606)

Introduction: The OCOJ

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A romanized version of poem (MYS.8.1606)

Introduction: The OCOJ

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Introduction: The OCOJ

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Introduction: The OCOJ

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Introduction: The OCOJ

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Plain text view generated from the markup:

Introduction: The OCOJ

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Glossed view showing constituency, generated from the

markup:

Introduction: The OCOJ

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Tree view generated from the markup:

Introduction: The OCOJ

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More information can be found on the OCOJ webpage:

http://vsarpj.orinst.ox.ac.uk/corpus/

  • A fully romanized version of all OJ texts
  • Markup and display conventions

Introduction: The OCOJ

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This paper investigates logical subjects in several mood-

related constructions in central Old Japanese (OJ), the language of 8th century Japan. We focus on imperative, prohibitive and optative constructions, expressing the desire of the speaker for either the speaker or another entity to perform (or not) an event (or situation) (cf. Aikhenvald 2010, Bybee et al. 1994).

These forms have not been discussed in any detail for OJ.

Previous literature (e.g., Frellesvig 2010, Vovin 2009) briefly describes them, but does not investigate the grammatical properties.

Introduction: The present study

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  • OJ has several forms expressing these categories:
  • yuk- ‘go’:

Introduction: The present study

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Imperative Prohibitive Optative

The three mood forms

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Imperatives canonically express a speaker’s will to

have an action performed with the expectation that someone (else) will perform the action. A canonical imperative encodes a Directive speech act (Searle 1975) on the part of the speaker (the one who “commands”).

A structural difference that sets imperatives apart from

declaratives and interrogatives, is that the logical subject is often null, even for languages like English which typically require overt subjects.

Imperatives

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In OJ, the logical subject of the imperative is also often null:

it is null in 160 of the 264 examples in the OCOJ (roughly 60%).

The remaining 104 examples (40%) have overt logical

subjects.

  • Of these examples, 86 do not occur with any particle.
  • The logical subject can be topicalized or focused.
  • What is significant is that the subject is never marked for

case.

Imperatives

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Example of imperative with an overt subject, no particle (86

examples)

Imperatives

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The logical subject is marked with the topic particle pa (12

examples):

Imperatives

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The logical subject is marked with the emphatic topic particle

mo (2 examples):

Imperatives

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The logical subject is marked with the restrictive particle dani

(2 examples):

Imperatives

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The logical subject is marked with the particle sapeni (1

example):

Imperatives

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The logical subject is marked with the particle yo (1

example):

Imperatives

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Imperatives may be embedded with complementizer to, in

two different types. One type, Type A, retains a command interpretation, i.e., “(I said) do X!”.

There are 30 tokens of the command type embedded

  • construction. (out of a total of 264 imperatives).

Of these examples 2/30 have overt logical subjects; they

are not followed by any particles.

Imperatives

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Example of embedded command-type imperative with

  • vert logical subject (2 examples):

Imperatives

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Example of embedded command-type imperative with

  • vert logical subject (2 examples):

Imperatives

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The second type, Type B, is used to mean “in order to do”;

(so) that X” and is not used to imply the will of the speaker to have an action carried out.

There are 32 examples of Type B embedded

“imperatives”, which share an interpretation of some future action with true imperatives, but differ in that there is no Directive speech act.

There are 6 examples with an overt subject. Significantly,

4 of these examples are case marked with the accusative

  • wo. (But 1 of the examples is not a reliable example.) The

subjects of other 2 examples are followed by the particle mo.

Imperatives

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Example of embedded non-command-type imperative

with overt logical subject (6 examples):

Imperatives

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The properties of overt subjects in Type A and Type B are

summarized as follows:

Imperatives

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There are two facts of primary interest in these data:

  • Case marked logical subjects do not occur with the

imperative in a command structure (either embedded or main clause), they do occur with embedded Type B (non- command structure) imperatives.

  • Case-marked logical subjects must be raised.

Imperatives

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Prohibitives are “negative imperatives”. Aikhenvald

(2010: 165) notes that negative imperatives have different morphology and/or syntax from both negative declaratives and positive imperatives in many languages.

There are a total of 194 examples of prohibitive

constructions in the OCOJ.

Prohibitives

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There are 4 ways to create prohibitive structures: na-

verb-so; na-verb-sone; final particle na; and prefix na, as shown below, listed by order of frequency in the OCOJ.

Prohibitives

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Cross-linguistically, it is common for the logical

subject of prohibitives, like imperatives, to be null.

Prohibitives

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In OJ, however, it is more common for the logical

subject to be overt in 3 of the 4 prohibitive constructions.

Only the prohibitive formed by the particle na (and

this is the sole prohibitive which survives into NJ) has more null logical subjects than overt ones.

The total number of overt subjects for all prohibitive

constructions is just slightly higher than null subjects.

The logical subject is never case marked; it can be

followed by the topic particles mo or pa or focus particle ya, but is most frequently not marked at all.

Prohibitives

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Prohibitives

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The logical subject of a prohibitive is Ø-marked:

Prohibitives

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The logical subject of a prohibitive is topicalized with pa:

Prohibitives

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The logical subject of a prohibitive is topicalized with mo:

Prohibitives

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The logical subject of a prohibitive is focused with ya:

Prohibitives

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All languages have an imperative and a prohibitive

(Sadock & Zwicky 1985), but not many have a dedicated

  • ptative; thus OJ, which has optatives as part of the

inflectional system, is unusual.

The optative is used to indicate the wish of a speaker for

an event to occur, but, unlike the imperative, there is no expectation on the part of the speaker that the logical subject will perform the event or situation; the optative expresses a desire while the imperative expresses a command.

Optatives

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OJ has 3 inflectional optative forms depending on

agreement with the logical subject, i.e., the entity the speaker wishes to do something.

This is unusual, as it is the only inflection in OJ for which

there is agreement between the verb and an argument.

Optatives

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There are three types of optatives in OJ, depending on

whether the logical subject is 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person:

Optatives

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An overt logical subject with optative -ana:

Optatives

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An overt logical subject with optative -ane:

Optatives

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An overt logical subject with optative -anamu ~ anamo:

Optatives

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As with the imperatives and prohibitives, the logical subject

is often null for -ana and -ane, but not as frequently null for

  • anamu ~ -anamo. This may be because the logical subject
  • f -ana and -ane is 1st person or 2nd person respectively,

and recoverable from context, whereas the logical subject of

  • anamu ~ -anamo is a 3rd person referent and it may not

always be clear from context who the referent is.

The ratio of overt subjects in each type:

Optatives

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Optatives

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In languages where imperatives are built on the 2nd person

form of the verb, the verb would restrict any overt subject to be one with 2nd person features (i.e., you).

1st or 3rd person phrases would be vocatives, as in

examples like:

  • [getting ready for a photo]

Boys, you stand on the left; girls, you stand on the right

Discussion: Subjects of imperatives

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In a study of imperative subjects, however, Zanuttini (2008)

argues that overt subjects in examples like this are not vocatives:

  • [getting ready for a photo]

Tall people stand in the back, shorter people stand in the front!

Discussion: Subjects of imperatives

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Due to differences in the grammars of English and OJ,

Zanuttini’s arguments do not carry over directly to OJ. However, we can still argue that OJ mood clause subjects are not vocatives. The evidence is very direct – there is a vocative marker in OJ, and it appears exactly once in all the mood constructions, repeated here:

Discussion: Subjects of imperatives

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What is significant is that this is the only instance of vocative

marking on any of the overt subjects in our examples. We would surely expect to find many more examples of overt subjects marked with the overt vocative marker yo if they were indeed vocative phrases.

There are also quite a few examples of imperatives with

right-dislocated subjects, 48 out of 264 imperatives, which might favour vocative marking, but only this one example has the vocative marking.

Discussion: Subjects of imperatives

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One approach to the meaning of imperatives is the

“Semantic Type View” as described in Zanuttini et al. (2012) and Portner (2012).

This view takes an imperative to be formally interpreted as a

property, an instruction on a To-Do List, and the subject of the imperative is the one whose To-Do List is at issue. So if “Close the door” is directed to John, then John’s To-Do List gets the instruction on it; it is on his list of things to do.

An advantage of this approach is that there can be lists of

different types, and this immediately allows an account of the different “forces” that imperatives can have, as well as extending easily to prohibitives and optatives.

Discussion: Semantics of mood clauses

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A prohibitive can straightforwardly be interpreted with

respect to a “Don’t-Do” list.

For an optative, there is no expectation that the logical

subject can or will bring about the action. Hence we can wish the clouds to part to reveal the sun, but we cannot

  • rder them to. An optative, then, involves a semantic “Wish

list”.

Discussion: Semantics of mood clauses

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As we have noted above, imperatives show a considerable

proportion of overtly expressed subjects: of 264 imperative clauses (main and subordinate), 104 have an overt subject.

This ratio of approximately 40% overt subjects appears to be

consistent with other clause-types in OJ.

As a comparison, we consider exclamative clauses, which

are probably the closest comparison clauses for imperatives: both types are typically used as main clauses, both are non- declaratives, and both express some desire, affect, or emotion on the part of the speaker.

Discussion: Overt Subjects

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Exclamative example:

Discussion: Overt Subjects

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The OCOJ shows 611 exclamatives, of which 247 have

  • vert subjects. So this is a ratio of just about 40% overt

subjects, once again.

Discussion: Overt Subjects

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Another surprising aspect of the syntax of all the mood

clauses is that there are no examples of overt subjects which are case marked.

Overt subjects may appear as bare NPs, or be marked by

various kinds of discourse or emphasis markers, but none have the grammatical case that one would expect to find on subjects, which is actually Genitive in OJ.

In OJ, Genitive case is found on overt subjects of most

clause types, primarily those which are subordinate or non- declarative (Frellesvig 2010, 127).

Discussion: Case marking

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If we look in the corpus, at least some instances of Genitive

subjects are found with every inflectional form of the predicate, with the exception of the 3 mood types we discuss

  • here. Again using exclamatives as a comparison, 59 out of

247 overt exclamative subjects are case marked (24%) – roughly 1 in 4.

However, in our three mood types, the ratios of case marked

to overt subjects are as follows: Imperative: 0/104 Prohibitive: 0/99 Optative: 0/42

Discussion: Case marking

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Nevertheless, as can be seen from the following chart, there

are plenty of overt subjects which should have the potential to be case-marked:

Discussion: Case marking

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So there is certainly something to explain about why mood

clauses do not show case-marked subjects. There must be a reason why subjects are never case marked in these clause- types.

One consequence of the Semantic Type view described

above is that the subject of an imperative picks out the individual whose list is to be updated with a new instruction.

The imperative clause does not have a canonical subject-

predicate relationship.

Discussion: Case marking

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It is possible that the lack of subject case marking with

mood-marked predicates is a reflex of this non-canonical relationship – the subject picks out the one(s) whose To-Do list (or other list) is to be updated, and the rest of the clause specifies the update.

It should be stressed that all other expected case marking

(Accusative, Dative, oblique markers) is found in all three types of mood clause in OJ, so there is nothing otherwise unusual about the grammar of these clauses.

Discussion: Case marking

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We have shown here that mood constructions in OJ have

the following notable properties:

  • a. Imperatives allow overt subjects.
  • b. Imperatives may be embedded.
  • c. Prohibitives allow overt subjects.
  • d. These overt subjects are not vocatives.
  • e. OJ has a set of dedicated optative forms.

Conclusion

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All mood forms allow overt subjects, but these subjects are

never case-marked as regular clausal subjects (in contrast to subjects of every other form of the predicate). These aspects of OJ syntax are quite unusual.

In the development from OJ to NJ, the optative forms were

replaced by other optative forms in EMJ (Frellesvig 2010), and then disappeared. NJ has a ‘desiderative’ form, which is formally unrelated to these earlier optative forms. The imperative and the prohibitive with post-verbal na remain in

  • NJ. The other prohibitive forms have been lost.

Conclusion

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  • Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2010. Imperatives and Commands. Oxford University Press.
  • Bybee, Joan L. & Revere Perkins and William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense,

Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. University of Chicago Press.

  • Frellesvig, Bjarke. 2010. A History of the Japanese Language. Cambridge University Press.
  • Frellesvig, Bjarke, Stephen Wright Horn, Kerri L. Russell, & Peter Sells. n.d. The Oxford Corpus
  • f Old Japanese. http://vsarpj.orinst.ox.ac.uk/corpus/corpus.html
  • Ginzburg, Jonathan and Ivan Sag. 2000. Interrogative Investigations. Stanford, CSLI Publishing.
  • Grosz, Patrick. 2011. On the Grammar of Optative Constructions. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
  • Martin, Samuel E. 1975. Reference Grammar of Japanese. Tuttle Publishing.
  • Narrog, Heiko. 2009. Modality in Japanese: The Layered Structure of the Clause and Hierarchies
  • f Functional Categories (Studies in Language Companion Series). John Benjamins Publishing

Company.

  • Nitta, Yoshio. 1991. Nihongo no Modality to Ninsyoo [Japanese modality and person]. Tokyo:

Hituji-syoboo.

  • Omodaka Hisataka, ed. 1967. Jidai Betsu Kokugo Daijiten: Jōdai Hen [A Dictionary of the

Japanese Language by Periods: Old Japanese Volume]. Tokyo: Sanseidō.

  • _____. 1984 [1957-1977]. Man'yōshū Chūshaku [Commentary on the Man'yōshū]. volumes 1-22.

Revised edition. Tokyo: Chuō Kōronsha.

  • Portner, Paul. 2012. “Imperatives”. To appear in M. Aloni and P. Dekker (eds.) The Cambridge

Handbook of Formal Semantics. Cambrige, Cambridge University Press.

References

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  • Russell, Kerri L. and Stephen Wright Horn. 2012. “Verb semantics and argument realization in pre-

modern Japanese: A corpus based study.” Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal, 25, 129-148.

  • Sadock, Jerrold M. and Arnold M. Zwicky. 1985. “Speech Acts Distinctions in Syntax”. Language

typology and syntactic description ed. by Timothy Shopen, 155-196. Cambridge University Press.

  • Searle, John. 1975. “Indirect speech acts”. Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts ed. by P. Cole &
  • J. L. Morgan, 59-82. New York: Academic Press.
  • Takagi Ichinosuke, Gomi Tomohide, & Ōno Susumu, eds. 1958-1962. Man'yōshū. Nihon Koten

Bungaku Taikei [A Survey of Japanese Classical Literature]: 4-7. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

  • Tsuchihashi Yutaka and Konishi Jin'ichi. 1957. Kodai Kayōshū [A Collection of Songs of the

Ancient Period]. Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei [A Survey of Japanese Classical Literature]. Vol. 3. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

  • Vovin, Alexander. 2009. A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese,

Volume 2: Adjectives and Verbs. Folkestone, UK: Global Oriental Press.

  • Zanuttini, Raffaella. 2008. “Encoding the Addressee in the Syntax: Evidence from English

Imperative Subjects”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 26, 185-218.

  • Zanuttini, Raffaella, Miok Pak and Paul Portner. 2012. “A Syntactic Analysis of Interpretive

Restrictions on Imperative, Promissive, and Exhortative Subjects”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 30, 1231-1274.

References

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Questions and Comments Welcome

Kerri L. Russell and Peter Sells

vsarpj@orinst.ox.ac.uk

Research Centre for Japanese Language and Linguistics University of Oxford オックスフォード大学 日本語研究センター www.orinst.ox.ac.uk/research/jap-ling/